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Morna Pearson isn't the most obvious
playwright to have her work open in the run up to Christmas. A darkly
comic mix of taboo-busting absurdism and social comment with a
magical realist twist. How to Disappear is a not exactly everyday
tale of a man called Robert, who confines himself indoors, where he
has been since Helen Daniels died. That was in 1997, when the passing
of Daniels, a fictional character from Australian TV soap,
Neighbours, marked the last link with the programme's original cast.

Since then, Robert has spent his days
literally tearing his hair out, with his kid sister Isla acting as
his carer, and only a menagerie of animals, including an iguana
called Scott and a corn snake called Charlene, for company. Scott and
Charlene, of course, were the characters played by Jason Donovan and
Kylie Minogue in Neighbours. Only benefits assessor Jessica, on a
mission to prove Robert fit for work, disturbs Robert and Isla's
little republic.

A solitary piano sits centre-stage on a
purple-lit mock up of New York's Carnegie Hall circa mid 1970s at the
opening of Douglas McGrath's loving dramatic homage to Carole King.
The precociously talented Brooklyn teenager churned out pop gems
before stepping into the spotlight to help define an era. When Bronte
Barbe's Carole breaks off mid-way through So Far Away, from her
multi-million selling 1971 album, Tapestry, to reflect on her
success, her un-starry kookiness is as Me-Generation as it gets.
Once King's past rewinds in this
touring version of Marc Bruni's production, McGrath's script moves
into the songwriting factory at 1650 Broadway., where her writing
partner and first husband Gerry Goffin compete with contemporaries
Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. Illustrating King's rise are the songs
themselves, performed by passable facsimiles of the Drifters, the
Shirelles etc, as if head-lining an all-star variety night.

There is a moment mid-way through the
second act of this UK touring revival of Laurence O'Keefe, Nell
Benjamin and Heather Hach's musical adaptation of the hit 2001 film
when the fun stops. Five minutes earlier, Anthony Williams' dazzling
pink-hued production was a riot of frothy song and dance routines
concerning the perils of Elle Woods, the cheer-leading sorority girl
who ditches her air-head image to train as a Harvard lawyer after her
preppy boyfriend dumps her. The next, just after plucky Elle saves
the day, she's warding off unwanted advances from the high-flying
legal eagle university professor who drafted her into his team of
interns to tackle the case of the celebrity fitness instructor and
her murdered husband.
Things have changed a bit since the
show first conquered Broadway a decade ago. In the current climate,
Elle's refusal to be man-handled in this way looks like a timely and
necessary act of everyday defi…

Caroline Deyga may be playing one of
the Ugly Sisters in the Citizens Theatre's seasonal production of
Cinderella, but she has already been to one ball this year without
any need of a fancy pair of slippers. As one of the high-flying
ensemble of actresses who brought Alan Warner's novel, The Sopranos,
to life in the National Theatre of Scotland's production of a show
restyled as Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour, the Carnoustie raised
actress was nominated with her onstage colleagues for an Olivier
award for best supporting actress. Deyga and chums may have lost out,
but former NTS artistic director Vicky Featherstone's production of
Billy Elliot writer Lee Hall's adaptation went on to scoop an Olivier
for Best New Comedy.

“It was a night I'll never forget,”
says Deyga. “Going to the Oliviers and living that experience with
those girls, it was amazing. Walking up the red carpet, and you sit
in your seat, and Brian May's sitting behind you, and Sheridan
Smith&…

This seasonal variation on the nouveau
cabaret sensation sired in the after-hours sleaze of the Edinburgh
Festival Fringe begins with a Christmas carol. Given the choice is O
Come All Ye Faithful, the candle-sporting troupe of dressed-up turns
may have other things on their mind.
Running as part of London-based
producers Underbelly's take on Edinburgh's Christmas, it's a welcome
return to La Clique, hosted with lascivious charm by divine Kit Kat
club refugee Bernie Dieter. The parade of acts that follow rattle
through assorted bite-size spectacles of excess.

Vicky Butterfly swishes into erotic
life with a languid burlesque routine that gets back to nature on
several levels. Leah Shelton is delivered onstage in a brightly
coloured hold-all, from which her legs run through an equally
decorative routine. Teen dream Tim Kriegler transforms aerialism into
an artform beyond pure physical spectacle. Heather Holliday shows off
he…

“Be as punk as you like,” says
music promoter and producer Alexander Cheparukhin, introducing this
live rendering of Riot Days, Pussy Riot leading light Maria
Alyokhina's explosive counter-cultural memoir, published in
September. Alyokhina was one of three members of the Russian
all-female anti-establishment live art troupe imprisoned in full
glare of the global media in 2012. This followed their arrest after a
forty-second guerilla performance inside Moscow's Orthodox Cathedral
of Christ the Saviour caught the public imagination. The publicity
also highlighted an intolerance of dissent by Vladimir Putin's
puritanical regime. Alongside fellow Pussy Rioters Nadezhda
Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevich, Alyokhina,received a two
year sentence for 'hooliganism motivated by religious hatred'.
Having remained in custody throughout the trial, she ended up serving
twenty-one months.

Carole King never wanted to watch the
musical play based on her life. This is what the iconic
singer/song-writer who penned a stream of 1960s hits with husband and
writing partner Gerry Goffin before recording her 1971 classic album,
Tapestry, told Hollywood writer and director Douglas McGrath when the
pair first met to talk about the project. McGrath's book would go on
to be drawn from a series of interviews with King, Goffin and their
song-writing contemporaries Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil.

King was happy to sign over the rights
of such era-defining pop nuggets as Will You Love Me Tomorrow and the
more reflective You've Got A Friend, but she didn't want her presence
in the audience to distract from what was happening onstage. Given
that some of that would be the breakdown of her marriage to Goffin,
the idea of the audience looking at her while this was happening
didn't appeal.

McGrath went along with this, and
figured that once the show opened she'd soon change h…

When Mischief-la-Bas tell
a story, it usually comes out a bit different to most other tall
tales made flesh. The Glasgow-based interactive outdoors-based
theatre company's long awaited take on nursery rhymes is no
different. This should be apparent in Nursery Crymes, a brand new
night time promenade performance, which explores the dark underbelly
that lies at the heart of some of the world's best known children's
stories.

With capacity for
audiences of up to 400 in staggered groups, over two nights, Nursery
Crymes will move through the back streets of Glasgow city centre.
This will see those attending convene on King Street, before taking a
trip into the depths of Mother Goose's forest. On an immersive on-set
street created by artist/designer Bill Breckenridge, the so-called
fun of the fair and other carnival headaches will be explored in the
extravaganza of the F***ed-Up Fairground. As the audience moves in,
out and around four zones in the area roughly surrounding the…

When the small screens on which digital
captions display both the titles and dialogue of Caryl Churchill's
remarkable 2012 work briefly fall prey to technical gremlins mid-way
through, without a word, the glitch accidentally sums up everything
both the play and this unique production is about. Broken into fifty
bite-scenes divided into four sections bridged by artfully riotous
scene-changes, Churchill's text strips language down to its bare
minimum. This is done by way of a series of duo-logues that show
people reaching out for each other, more often than not in vain.
In a world where social media,
computer-generated communication and virtual technology keeps
everything at an increasingly distant remove, flesh and blood
encounters are increasingly brief. As each couple attempts to get to
the heart of the matter in scenes sometimes barely longer than a
sketch, plenty of room is left for interpretation.

Less than a year ago, David Bates thought he might well be done with Edinburgh. The owner and producer of the Famous Spiegeltent, who had transformed a ninety-seven year old construction into a global brand which in part had come to define the spirit of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, had been told that the site the Famous Spiegeltent had operated out of in St Andrew Square since 2014 was no longer available. Essential Edinburgh, who manage the site, said they wanted the Gardens to return to a “relaxation space,” although the short notice of their decision left the Famous Spiegeltent without a home for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

All this created a bit of a kerfuffle, exacerbated somewhat by Edinburgh International Festival using St Andrew Square for this year's Standard Life sponsored opening event, the light-based spectacular, Bloom.

Ten months on, Bates is back in Edinburgh even if the Famous Spiegeltent as a physical entity isn't. A different spiegeltent is here, howeve…

Will Young's pasty-faced Emcee pokes
his head through the giant 'O' in the word 'WILLKOMMEN' that covers
the stage curtain at the start of this touring revival of composer
John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb's finest musical hour. Young's
peek-a-boo moment shatters through something monumental, even as it
hails the coming new order. With Emcee the gate-keeper to Berlin's
1930s underground club scene, Young resembles a malevolent doll in
leather lederhosen. By the end of the first act, Young is pulling the
strings, as he leads a chilling version of Tomorrow Belongs To Me.
Such are the delicious contradictions
of a show originally drawn from Christopher Isherwood's Berlin
stories, with Young Olivier nominated when he first appeared in Rufus
Norris' West End production five years ago. On the one hand, Joe
Masteroff's book is a damning indictment of how austerity culture and
mass disaffection is exploited by p…

Mid-way through this stark meditation
on loss, and the care that's required in the lead up to that loss,
actress Pauline Goldsmith stands in the swirl of strings conjured up
by the twelve musicians who surround her. Up until then, her
character has been a kind of hospital ward-bound raconteur, reeling
off warts and all yarns concerning the funeral of a friend called
Peter, and his descent into death that pre-ceded it. Dressed in
scarlet in a world of black and white, Goldsmith's deadpan and
unflinching monologues at moments recall the taboo-busting
elaborations of 1970s comedian Dave Allen.
In this cross-artform collaboration
between Vanishing Point theatre company and the Scottish Ensemble,
however, Goldsmith's punchlines come through four pieces by Estonian
composer Arvo Part. With the Scottish Ensemble playing them live, as
Goldsmith stands among the twelve musicians, it looks like they
might have been conjured from her own mind …

When a track from David Paul Jones'
Samuel Beckett inspired Something There album was played on the
radio, a remarkable thing happened. Jones' contemporary classical
suite, performed by the Ayrshire-born composer's eight-piece DPJ
Ensemble, had been released by Linn Records, and was picked up by
Australia's ABC Classic FM station. The third track, the wistfully
named The Sun Comes and Goes in the Land of Woop-Woop, was a
particular favourite. Over its nearly sixteen minutes duration, the
music's layers of piano, cello and saxophone soaked ambience evolves
into a heartfelt emotional meditation made flesh by its vocal
arrangements.

When it was played, one listener
emailed Jones care of Linn, to thank him for the piece. More
specifically, the writer of the email was hospital-bound and in
constant pain with terminal cancer. When he turned on the radio and
heard Jones' music, however, as Jones remembers it, “He said for
that moment, or for the track's duration, …

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart stands in
peri-wigged triumph. Towards the end of what's billed as 'an
electronic essay collage opera', the shades-sporting eighteenth
century composer looks every inch the glam-tastic pop star he was,
living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful body of work. For
the last hour or so, Mozart has been squaring up to Raymond Scott,
one of the great-grand-daddies of twentieth century electronic music,
whose experiments with gadgets and gizmos saw him invent what he
called the Electronium, which was arguably the world's first
self-composing synthesiser. The future would have sounded a lot
different without Scott's pioneering work, and Bob Moog,who worked
with him prior to inventing the epoch-changing Moog synthesiser,
cited his former employer as a major influence.

Here, Scott's inventions open up a
wormhole in time that sees Mozart take a leap into a future that
allows him…

It could be anywhere, the sparse
expanse of beach littered with washed-up detritus that covers the
stage throughout Jack Nurse's revival of Anders Lustgarten's quietly
impassioned plea for humanity. As the title of Lustgarten's play
makes clear, it is actually the Italian island that is the gateway to
Europe for migrants attempting to flee Syria and other places. It is
also where Andy Clark's grim-faced fisherman Stefano is employed to
scoop up the drowned bodies of those who didn't make it.

Closer to home, in a northern English
town on the other side of the world, Anglo-Chinese student Denise
attempts to make ends meet as a debt collector for a payday loan
company. Louise Mai Newberry's Denise is smart enough to understand
how poverty and prejudice work, but is herself trapped by her
mother's incapacity.

As Lustgarten's twin monologues weave
across each other, the connections between the two become painfully
clea…

The London East End laid bare in Italian film-maker Lorenza Mazetti’s fascinating 52 minute piece of post World War Two poetic realism looks a far cry from the gentrified hipster’s paradise it would become half a century later. Dating from 1956, the novelty of seeing the film now as part of a UK tour promoted by the Bo'ness-based Hippodrome Film Festival, who commissioned a new live score by contemporary improvisers Raymond MacDonald and Christian Ferlaino, is the presence of the then unknown Leith-born artist Eduardo Paolozzi.

In his only acting role, the then thirty-two year old Paolozzi appears alongside painter Michael Andrews as a pair of deaf dockers navigating their way through the blitz-battered streets. Here, gangs of children mock the men's silence with delighted cruelty, while the pair remain oblivious to the everyday noises of the pub, market and fun fair. As a double act, where Andrews lean-ness reflects his outgoing desi…

It was fifty years ago this year that
the so-called summer of love burst forth with a wave of hippy
idealism played out to a psychedelic soundtrack. In the UK, much of
the activity sprang from the coming together of counter-cultural
forces two years earlier at the International Poetry Incarnation.
Held at the Royal Albert Hall, this iconic event put American beat
poet Allen Ginsberg at the top of the bill of some of the finest
(male) minds of his generation.

Immortalised on film by Peter
Whitehead's short documentary film, released the same year, the IPA
subsequently spawned numerous Happenings, where psych-rock bands,
triptastic light shows and freaky dancing set the template for high
times to come. Barry Miles, who worked at Better Books, where the
idea for the IPA was hatched, saw the possibility for a magazine to
help disseminate all the alternative ideas that were brewing around
sex, drugs and rock and roll. The result of this was International
Times, or IT, a playful and p…

When Jonathan Lloyd decided to direct a
production of Caryl Churchill's play, Love and Information, with
final year students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland's unique
three year BA Performance in British Sign Language and English
degree, he knew it wasn't an obvious choice. On the one hand, the
recently installed director of Solar Bear theatre company had a group
of performers who all define themselves as deaf or D/deaf (more of
the latter definition later), who would be embarking on their first
ever tour of professional venues. This would showcase the company's
talents with maximum exposure beyond the relatively safe confines of
the academic environment.

On the other, Lloyd had selected a play
looking at the information age, but which, over its fifty short
scenes, is seriously open to interpretation. With no stage directions
or any indication of setting or character names, the result of this
is a tantalising production performed by a cast of ten in a mix of
Br…

When the editorial team behind a
mould-breaking satirical magazine go over the top at the end of the
first act of Ian Hislop and Nick Newman's play, as heroic gestures
go, it's no joke. This is World War One, after all, and the merry
pranksters from an ad hoc zine called The Wipers Times are on the
frontline of battle in the Belgian town no-one can pronounce. Given
that the men are genuinely going over the top and into battle,
casualties are considerably higher than the occasional suit for
libel.
Led by rebellious officers Fred Roberts
and Jack Pearson, the magazine allows a rare voice for good-natured
if at times scurrilous dissent on the trenches, and acts as an
inadvertent morale booster. The bad guys, of course, are the
office-bound pen-pushers and top brass bureaucrats, represented here
by Sam Ducane’s cartoon toff, Lieutenant Colonel Howfield.

While it never totally transcends its TV roots, the play's
sit-com style scenes are peppere…

There’s
nothing remotely flabby about Wire, the wilfully singular accidental
veterans of the so-called punk wars, who recently insisted on Marc
Riley’s BBC 6Music A-Z of Punk that they categorically weren’t
punk at all. Given that the metal machine music of this year’s
Silver/Lead album sounds as driven and as purposeful as any of their
initial trilogy of 1977-79 albums, you can see their point.

Live,
the band's original core trio of Colin Newman, bassist Graham Lewis
and drummer Robert Grey, plus guitarist Matthew Simms, take no
prisoners, and never play to type. This is the case from the
curiously rock star-like head-wear of Lewis and chief vocalist and
guitarist Newman - a flat cap and a trucker’s cap respectively - to
the stoic refusal to play almost anything resembling ‘the hits’.
As the ipad perched on Newman's mic stand, from which he reads his
lyrics suggests, Wire are as twenty-first century as it gets.

Ian Hislop and Nick Newman are used to
being in the frontline. As editor and cartoonist respectively of
satirical bible Private Eye, they have spent many a year dodging
metaphorical bullets from an outraged political establishment. As
script-writers too, ever since they worked on revues together while
at Ardingly College public school in West Sussex (also the alma mater
of four Conservative MPs – so far), they have consistently bitten
the hand that feeds them.

While Hislop is best known as
long-standing team captain on satirical TV quiz show, Have I Got News
For You, Newman's career as writer and cartoonist has seen his work
appear in high-end publications such as Punch and The Spectator.
Together as writers, they created the character of gormless toff and
old Ardinglyian, Tim Nice-But-Dim, for The Harry Enfield Show on TV,
and, among numerous radio works, in 1994 penned Gush, a satire based
on the Gulf War and written in the style of Jeffrey Archer.

About Me

Coffee-Table Notes is the online archive of Neil Cooper. Neil is an arts writer and critic based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Neil currently writes for The Herald, Product, Scottish Art News, Bella Caledonia & The List. He has contributed chapters to The Suspect Culture Book (Oberon), Dear Green Sounds: Glasgow's Music Through Time and Buildings (Waverley) & Scotland 2021 (Eklesia), & co-edited a special Arts and Human Rights edition of the Journal of Arts & Communities (Intellect). Neil has written for A-N, The Quietus, Map. Line, The Wire, Plan B, The Arts Journal, The Times, The Independent, Independent on Sunday, The Scotsman, Sunday Herald, Scotland on Sunday, Sunday Times (Scotland), Scottish Daily Mail, Edinburgh Evening News, Is This Music? & Time Out Edinburgh Guide. He has written essays for Suspect Culture theatre company, Alt. Gallery, Newcastle, Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, Berwick upon Tweed Film and Media Arts Festival & Ortonandon. Neil has appeared on radio and TV, has provided programme essays for John Good and Co, & has lectured in arts journalism at Napier University, Edinburgh.